Pelourinho by Tierno Monenembo describes an innovative approach to identity formation in the African novel, a sort of migration of Brazilian imaginings of Pelourinho (a historical suburb of Salvador de Bahia) to Africa, the ancestral land. This reading is offered through the prism of the anthropological concept of Arjun Appadurai's ethnoscape which recalls the features of a migrant literature or migritude, to use Jacques Chevrier's term. In this case, the sense of belonging is relativized, the identities are constantly shifting and the imaginary migrant demythologizes the founding myths; this creative literature draws heavily on the fluidity of imaginary identity as well as transculture. As a result, the technicality of writing springs from the postmodernist literary sources, making the act of writing an oscillation of textual weaving and unweaving, of construction and identity deconstruction which are specific features of contemporary discourse on identity. This stratified, archeologized identity is a shifting identity resulting from transfer and hybridization.

The first literary productions of Henri-Pierre Roché are short stories published in different reviews at the start of the 20th century. This article presents the six short stories in question and analyses their principal themes while situating Roché as a young author who, not without audacity, proves to be quite aware of the modernity around him.

Amin Maalouf's novel Leo Africanus demonstrates the diasporic identity in its relation with geographical space, its temporal deployment, and its relation with the Other, thus stimulating a perpetual repositioning of the modern subject. In this sense we should conceive identity as a "production" which is never complete, always in process. This essay provides an outline for a certain reflection on diasporic identity that could help to understand more profoundly our diasporic era, especially the "transnational moment" that we all experience.

This article describes the creation of pedagogical material from the contemporary African art exhibition 'Africa Remix' in 2007 by a group of South African French foreign language teachers. While aimed at improving language skills in a foreign language learning context, the activities created lend themselves particularly well to an intercultural approach. The notions of culture, identity and 'Africanness', probed by the artists in their works and interviews, are revisited in the classroom by students through the suggested tasks and activities. An overview of the evolution of the intercultural approach within the field of language didactics provides an insight into its relevance today as well as its role within the rapidly evolving South African socio-cultural context. Finally, the article illustrates how Africa Remix's themes, as well as its pedagogical exploitation, aspire to more far-reaching goals in language teaching.

This article presents a pragmatic study of connection words in a legal text, especially in the Constitution of the 3rd Republic of the DRC. We show that the interpreter of the law must understand the instructions given by these linguistic markers to comprehend the legislator's intention. The study considers two types of instructions : the first related to the same semantics' content and the second related to different semantic contents.

La Condition humaine is considered to illustrate the disappearance of exotism from Malraux's fiction, with little left of the typically 'foreign' aspects traditional in the genre of adventure novel sets in distant lands. This study proposes to contradict this view by showing how the said exotism is still very much alive in the novel, albeit in an understated manner. We follow the movements of a group of revolutionary terrorists, as they secretly meet in shoddy shops for clandestine briefings. We do not concentrate on what they discuss, but rather on what the shops sell and - in the most striking of these shops - on the relationship between the hero and the shop attendant. The study offers a comprehensive view of the way the shops are positioned within the structure of the narration. The reader comes to see the powerful link which, in Malraux's imagination, gives their meaning to the objects for sale - be it clocks, light fittings, live fishes or antiques. Ultimately, the success or failure of the revolutionary fighter is highlighted by his response to the peculiar environment the shops provide. The concluding argument is set on the assumption that real life events in Malraux's earlier travels to Asia are processed through the fictional mill of the novel. In bringing together an aspect of the setting of the novel and the action, the study comes to shed a new light on the true meaning of the exotic tone of La Condition humaine.

The novel of Martine Le Coz, Le Nègre et la Méduse, focuses on one of the principal maritime tragedies of the XIXth century : The Wreck of the Medusa. From this historical drama, she traces back the fate of the Negro Alpha, passenger against his wishes, of the frigate Méduse. In fact, it is a pretext to approach questions connected to otherness, memory and identity ... Le Nègre et la Méduse presents a certain kind of discontinuity in the representation of the shipwreck of the Méduse, in that it essentially draws on what is left unsaid in the « classic » portrayals of the drama. The author follows the footsteps of Géricault in a narrative situating itself midway between fact and fiction, signaling a distinct literary project at odds with what could be considered as traditional in the literature on the Méduse, a literature interrogated in this novel.

L'Ombre de Liberty is seen as an aesthetics of the night. The night as mise en abyme, which dialectises itself by processes of discontinuity affecting both the thematics and the narrative, the sound and the visual, allows us to read, beyond the "big syntagmatics of the story" (Metz 1984), yet another story, chanted with sounds, symbols, graphic elements, focalisations, etc. Classic African cinematographic writing, which come about in realism and in satisfaction of "the horizon of expectation", has seen a profound alteration through the initiation of an "aesthetic distance": the intransitive gesture constitutes the most cutting feature of modernity (Barthes 1984). This Shadow also represents the "nocturnal" in any radical artistic experience. The reflexive gesture gives way to an ironic visuality where the cinematographic signifier comes to consider itself as its own subject.

This collection is made up of 14 critical essays (7 in English and 7 in French) selected from a total of 30 papers delivered at a conference devoted to "The Changing Face of African Literature", organized in March 2006 at the Centre for African Studies (C.A.L.S.) of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg campus). As indicated in the preface by Liz Gunner, the first director of C.A.L.S., the aim of the conference was both to examine the new trends in African literature (all the works considered were published no earlier than the 1990s) while going beyond the language barrier which for so long has hindered the development of the literature itself as well as literary criticism devoted to the field.